“We are already there,” Shapleigh told Hance in a letter after the chancellor expressed concerns about proposals to limit tuition increases.

Hance served in the state Senate in the mid and late 1970s before going on to represent Lubbock and parts of west Texas in the U.S. Congress.

In his letter, Shapleigh uses Iowa and Texas Tech as an example to underscore the funding disparity. Each university has a similar number of students. Last year, Iowa lawmakers appropriated $348 in state money to run the University of Iowa. Texas Tech got $164 million at the same time from Texas lawmakers. Over 10 years, the difference amounts to $1.8 billion, Shapleigh noted.

“Unless our state has the political courage to create a tax system worthy of our universities and the future of a great state, Tech and other similarly situated universities will never catch up,” Shapleigh said in the letter to Hance.